Over three and a half decades, Ted Conover has ridden the rails with hoboes, crossed the border with Mexican immigrants, guarded prisoners in Sing Sing, and inspected meat for the USDA. His books and articles chronicling these experiences, including the award-winning Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, have made him one of the premier practitioners of immersion reporting.In immersion reporting—a literary cousin to ethnography, travel writing, and memoir—the writer fully steps into...

**From Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Newjack, a passage through an America lived wild and off the grid, where along with independence and stunning views come fierce winds, neighbors with criminal pasts, and minimal government and medical services.“In these dispatches, [Conover] invites readers to ride shotgun along an unraveling edge of the American West, where sepia-toned myths about making a fresh start collide with mode...

WHITEOUT is Ted Conover's classic report on life among the wealthy and the narcissistic–as well as some real people–in Aspen, Colorado. Former Hugh Hefner paramour and Playboy executive Barbi Benton holds her annual pajama party. Celebrity photographer Annie Liebovitz actually finds someone who doesn't want his picture taken: Hunter Thompson. New Agers claim UFO sightings and seek eternal life. Hardrock miners struggle to hold on to an older way of life in the face of all of this. And abov...

After he was denied access to report on Sing Sing, one of America's most notorious high security jails, journalist Ted Conover applied to become a prison guard. As a rookie officer, or 'newjack', Conover spent a year in the unpredictable, intimidating and often violent world of America's penal system.Unarmed and outnumbered, prison officers at one of America's toughest maximum security jails supervise 1,800 inmates, most of whom have been convicted of violent felonies: murder, mans...

A creative memoir reflecting on a long-ago summer love and the choices we make—"built on dreams and memories of what never happened, but could have" ( USA Today).Exploring the fault lines of adult nostalgia and desire, this work of creative nonfiction—a Bakeless Prize winner—re-creates the achingly intense adolescent summer days that Amy Benson and the sparkling-eyed boy spent together on the shores of the remote St. Mary's River of Michigan's Upper Penins...

Hopping a freight in the St. Louis rail yards, Ted Conover—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award—embarks on his dream trip, traveling the rails with "the knights of the road." Equipped with rummage store clothing, a bedroll, and his notebooks, Conover immerses himself in the peculiar culture of the hobo, where handshakes and intoductions are foreign, but where everyone knows where the Sally (Salvation Army) and the Willy (Goodwill) are. Along the way he encounters unexpected cha...

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Newjack*,* an absorbing book about roads and their power to change the world.Roads bind our world—metaphorically and literally—transforming landscapes and the lives of the people who inhabit them. Roads have unparalleled power to impact communities, unite worlds and sunder them, and reveal the hopes and fears of those who travel them.With his marvelous eye for detail a...

A fascinating personal account of life at this infamous prison during a bygone era.Written more than eighty years ago, Fifty Years in Sing Sing is the personal account of Alfred Conyes (1852–1931), who worked as a prison guard and then keeper at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, from 1879 to 1929. This unpublished memoir, dated 1930, was found among his granddaughter's estate by his great-granddaughter Penelope Kay Jarrett. Near the end of his life, ...

In this classic tale of life among undocumented migrants, Ted Conover, author of Newjack, immerses himself in a world few Americans ever see and fewer still come to know. He gets himself smuggled across the border, works on citrus ranches, accompanies workers to industrial L.A., Phoenix, Florida, and Idaho, and travels deep into Mexico to understand the poverty that begins the whole cycle. He helps migrants workers navigate America and sees it anew through their eyes. By turns harrowing an...

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing is the story of Conover's rookie year as a guard at Sing Sing. It is a nerve-jangling account of his passage into the storied prison and the culture of its guards—both fresh-faced "newjacks" like Conover and brutally hardened veterans. As he struggles to be a good officer, Conover angers inmates, dodges blows, works to balance decency with toughness, and participates in prison rituals—strip frisks, cell searches, cell "extractions"—that exact a toll on ...

"I crouched quietly in the patch of tall weeds. Around me fell the shadow of the viaduct that carried a highway over the railroad yards. From the edge of the yards, I squinted as I watched the railroad cars being switched from track to track. Cars and trucks were rolling over the viaduct, but what occupied my attention was the dark, cool corridor underneath it, where I hoped to intercept my train."Riding the rails, Ted Conover tasted the life of a tramp with companions like Pistol ...

**From Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Newjack, a passage through an America lived wild and off the grid, where along with independence and stunning views come fierce winds, neighbors with criminal pasts, and minimal government and medical services.“In these dispatches, [Conover] invites readers to ride shotgun along an unraveling edge of the American West, where sepia-toned myths about making a fresh start collide with mode...